The Wages of Fear (1953)
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
In a run-down South American town, four men are paid to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin into the jungle through to the oil field. Friendships are tested and rivalries develop as they embark upon the perilous journey.
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What critics compared The Wages of Fear to
You have to go back to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1952 "The Wages of Fear" (recently shown at the Biograph) to recall suspense this relentless.
William Friedkin’s follow-up to The Exorcist was Sorcerer, an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear, which also inspired Henri-George Clouzot’s film of the same name.
The plot of William Friedkin's suspense thriller originated with the same Georges Arnaud novel that inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot's French suspense classic The Wages of Fear (1953).
It's based on the George Arnaud novel "The Wages of Fear" -- the same novel that inspired Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film of the same name -- and everything else about the story is really only details in service of the chief plot development: All four main characters, in need of precious pesos to help them complete their transformed identities, are hired to drive two trucks laden with nitroglycerin over a mountain range, through a jungle and to the site of an oil-well-turned-inferno.
Sorcerer is, after all, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear , though credited in the film as an adaptation of Georges Arnaud's novel.
There’s a moment in the interview with William Friedkin which forms this Blu-ray disc’s only extra in which he insists that Sorcerer is not a remake of The Wages of Fear , the award-winning and highly praised drama directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1953.
…it's like The Wages of Fear redone at roller-coaster tempo.
The result is clean, delirious, and, yes, speedy—the best big-vehicle-in-peril movie since Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear.”
One would have to go back to The Wages of Fear , Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film about hired European workers moving nitroglycerin over mountain dirt roads, to match The Hurt Locker 's mix of intelligent character observation and white-knuckle tension.
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Bizarrely, what begins as a reprise of the drug-crazed Alfred Molina scene from Boogie Nights mutates unexpectedly into an LA-bound remake of The Wages of Fear , with kids instead of dynamite as the truck’s volatile cargo.
On the upside, this may be no "The Wages of Fear," but most of the action is compelling, even during the flood scenes, where it's tough to piece together exactly who is where and what's happening to whom.
For the film-nerdy there are allusions to Duel or even The Wages of Fear and/or Sorcerer abound (we've got a truck, and bad things are afoot), but the purest exemplar I can equate it to is the Mercedes transport that Indiana Jones beats up midway through Raiders of the Lost Ark.